


72-Hour Quarantine

by Clementine19



Category: The Last of Us (Video Games)
Genre: F/M, Idiots Pining, Softie Joel (The Last of Us), death scares, feel free to roast me i'll probably come back and edit this in a sweaty panic, hello pals i've never had a single fic beta read, idiots getting over their dumb selves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-12
Updated: 2020-10-12
Packaged: 2021-03-08 03:07:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,615
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26978578
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clementine19/pseuds/Clementine19
Summary: Reader is near-bitten, Joel & she don't love the experience, and reader quarantines for three days in Jackson before they reunite.From this ask: loving your stories! How about a sort of combination of kink prompts 41/70? Joel/Reader are out on patrol, she gets almost bitten (he confirms it doesn’t break the skin somehow but scares the hell out of both of them). Back in Jackson she insists on quarantining for a few days to make sure she’s not infected (he thinks it’s unnecessary). As soon as Joel gets her home from her self-imposed quarantine, he needs to have her in an I-almost-lost-you-Don’t-ever-do-that-again desperate kind of way.[Oops dear god I’m sorry I had to do three days of overture before they get into it.]
Relationships: Joel (The Last of Us)/Reader, Joel/Reader
Comments: 2
Kudos: 58





	72-Hour Quarantine

The wind goes out of you as a runner collides with your side, his wayward arms circling into a surprisingly effective tackle. The thing looks especially ragged and your arms are pinned under yourself as you try to reload with it gnashing on top of you. You hear Joel yell your name and fire, but he hits just left of the runner’s spine and only adds a jerk to its unsettling movement. 

You shoot it point-blank in the chest by the time you chamber a round, earning an upset gurgling wail—this thing might be just a day or two away from clicking already, no way to tell how long it had been out here.

You feel the hard semicircle of its mouth close over your shirt-covered shoulder. The pressure makes your head spin but you don’t feel the telltale puncture of teeth. It lasts for two seconds before Joel fires again, the sound deafening you at this range and spraying blood all over your face. The sighted clicker falls slack, a toothless mouth lolling open as you register what happened and freeze on the floor where you are.

Ears ringing, your back is against Joel’s chest as his hands scrabble to see the damage. 

“Hope you’re still listening,” you say to him without hearing yourself, trying not to look at your shoulder. “Can’t hear a fucking thing.”

He ignores you and gets the strap of your undershirt off and runs his palm over a purpling pressure wound, raw from the force of the bite but skin unbroken. You’ve gone quiet in stark resignation. 

You feel him stroke the side of your face as if to turn it towards the mark and you look, ringing not dissipating but his voice coming through stronger. No teeth, no blood drawn, but the way blood pools at the surface and darkens made you anxious. Your skin is near-shiny with the discoloration.

“Not broken,” he pronounces and you exhale. 

You push away from him and stand, righting your clothes.

“Hey, you’re good, right? You’re good,” Joel’s hands close over both of your biceps, watching your face.

“I need to quarantine. When we get back.” 

“No you don’t, the skin is going to be fine—just need some ice,” he scrubs a hand over his face, watching you closely.

“Joel, I need you to cover for me, okay? I’m not showing this to Maria,” you’re adamant but glance down.

“Nothing to cover because, you’re okay,” he says doggedly, tapping at the split-open jaw of the clicker with the toe of his boot. 

Joel takes a cautious step closer, repeating his gentle reassurances. His hand goes to your jaw and you realize he’s about to do something stupid, so you push away and turn down the hall to make your way back to the horses.

“I could be infected, Joel,” you say apologetically, too awash in ‘what-if’ to register that after four months of awkward, sweet, near-heated interactions, he’d tried to kiss you at the dumbest possible opportunity.

“That it?” He asks, one hand tucked in his belt, same as he always did when he wasn’t sure where to put them. He doesn’t look defensive as much as severely let down. 

You stop and look back at him.

“No, of course not. But now I need to go lock myself inside for three days so I don’t eat you about it, alright?” You watch each other with searching eyes for a second before he follows you out to the horses. 

—

_Jackson, Wednesday Evening_

It’s evening by the time you get in and stable the horses, Joel half-watching you but evidently convinced that you hadn’t been infected as you hand off your horse in the stables. You trudge silently towards home, not speaking until you reach your porch. 

“I’ll see you Saturday,” you say quietly, shuffling up your steps, aching for a hot shower that you were a little hopeful would run cold.

Joel chuckles and looks up at you under his dark brows.

“I’ll see you in a few hours,” he dismisses. 

You give him a soft smile. 

“Bring your shotgun,” you joke, knowing it is weak deflection.

He rolls his eyes at you and retreats to the street, hands thrust in his coat. 

—

_Jackson, Wednesday, Midnight_

You’re showered and settled on your couch with a nice fire heating the living room you still can’t believe is yours, your legs slung off of one edge as you balance your book on your chest.

You’ve read this particular paragraph four times: spent the first thinking about your mortality and whether or not Joel could actually kill you right in this spot if you turn, the second totally assured that quarantining is the right choice, the third, whether or not a kiss could transfer the virus, and the fourth about the way he would taste, how his hand would feel guiding your jaw like that again.

A knock startles you on your fifth pass, and you squint over the back of the couch before rising.

You peer through the door and sigh, walking around your entryway to slide open the dining room window and poke your head out. Joel’s hands are in his pockets again, rocking back and forth on one foot. He raises an eyebrow at you, curtains parted around your shoulders and hair knotted on top of your head.

“Can I come in?” He speaks to you quietly, low drawl never requiring a lot of volume between you. 

“Joel, you know why not,” you sigh. He’s already dragging a chair from your porch parallel to your location in the window seat. 

“Fine, even though you’re fine,” he replies, taking a seat and tugging two beers from his jacket. You accept the one he passes through.

“No gurgling yet, zero moaning,” you report, toasting him through the window. 

“I see that,”  Joel says, crossing one ankle over his opposite knee.

—

_Jackson, Thursday, Morning_

“Joel, I’m fine, I’m me, still good,” you call, traipsing down the stairs and acquiring articles of clothing as you go, rubbing your eyes at the bright downstairs light. His broad frame is haunting your entire front door, but you duck to the side the poke open the dining room window, even with this cold. As you get settled on the window seat, a covered plate of food enters your line of vision. It looks like an omelette stuffed with something, steaming the edges of the container. 

“Did you make me breakfast?” You ask sleepily.

“Hopefully lasts a little more than that, I’m out on route four today,” he explains. “And I only mentioned to Ellie. She’ll keep quiet, everyone thinks you have the flu otherwise.”

It smells fantastic, and you note he might actually have managed to preserve some of the herb garden persisting away in his backyard, decades after the outbreak. 

You don’t know what to say to him or the casual, presumptuous intimacy so you just bite your lower lip to avoid saying something stupid. Watching the edge of hopefulness on his features makes it hard to look at him directly. You decided yesterday that you’re going to climb into his lap the second you can be close again, counting out stupid, anxious missed time. You probably could have kissed him months ago, based on the way he’s acting now, and instead you’d both just shuffled back to your respective houses to sit in consumed solitude night after night.

“Thank you,” you finally give weakly. He smiles and starts to make his way off of the porch, hand on a column as he rounds it. The way he moves through the world is so visceral and practical, and you look at him a little longer than you mean to.

“Joel,” you start. He looks back with those eyes and their intense focus, warm at the edges for regarding you.

“Be safe, please,” you ask.

“If I’m not, I’ll just come in there with you,” he’s more bold than he’d ever been, smile tugging up the corner of his mouth before he turns. You sigh and watch him stride away, shamelessly taking in his form with your chin on your hand. 

—

_Jackson, Thursday, Late_

The knocking doesn’t startle you this time, his rhythm familiar now. You want to tick the lock open and just let him inside, for both your sakes, but you don’t, for everyone’s sake. 

“How was patrol?” You ask, sliding the door open. 

“Are you good?” he plows.

“Me first. Are you?” You counter. You’d be a moaning heap of erratic pain if you were going to turn at this point.

Joel relents and nods. 

“Brought back some things from town,” he says sheepishly, pushing you a paper-wrapped section of meat and a small basket of vegetables. They’re stacked with suspicious neatness, lashed together with a neatly tied bow of twine. They don’t come that way at the market stalls. 

—

_Jackson, Friday, Early Afternoon_

Joel doesn’t get a reply after the first two knocks, and he rushes to the back door. He can hear a record warbling and the uniform sounds of something being chopped, letting his shoulders sink a couple of inches from their tense alert.

You’d been trying to prepare what he’d brought you last night in silence and couldn’t get free of repeating your conversations, brief little snippets of tipsy exchanges. It’s not like you’d spoken much since he’d been hovering over your one-house quarantine zone, but you suppose there’s not a lot left to say. You’ve got exactly one thing to express to him and it doesn’t require a hell of a lot of talking at this point. 

He hears a deep male voice thrumming along, inflected with guitar and accompaniments that crackle through the vinyl player in the kitchen. He raises his hand to the back door to knock before your voice joins in, catching on just one verse. 

_You know I dreamed about you_

_For twenty-nine years before I saw you_

You’re trying your damndest to do a nice job of cutting neat circles of the squash he’d picked out, slow thumps of the knife hitting the board running along with the music. You sing distractedly, only to yourself. 

_You know I dreamed about you_

_I missed you for, for twenty-nine years_

Joel pulls his hand back, running it over his beard and seeing how quietly he can sneak back to your front door. 

When he knocks, the first side of the record is run out and you sigh in relief, still murmuring a soft _fuck me_ because who knows how long he’d been there. 

You pop open the dining room window.

“Want to come to the back porch? Trying to do what you brought me some justice, and you should take some home for you and Ellie,” you get out calmly, gesturing to the path he’d just snuck along below the view of the windows. 

Joel retraces his steps with a small smile. 

You fling open the window over the sink and he leans in, forearms crossed over each other. 

“That smells delicious,” he comments, watching you carefully layer the vegetables, alternating their colors one over the other. You’d never been any type of a cook before the outbreak, but in Jackson, time was almost predictable enough to spend meditative little moments on details. You took to it well, especially when the source of the food was a bit more precious than whatever generic options supermarkets peddled before. This was grown in Jackson, hunted in Jackson—carried to you by a man whose whole height can barely handle the window he’s leaning into. Maybe you’re pouring extra focus into hoping he hadn’t heard your choice pining through the windows a moment before while he watches you attentively.

Sliding it into the oven with a satisfied nod, you set the manual timer to two hours and look up nervously.

“Well. It’ll be a bit,” you shrug. 

“Fix me a drink then, honey?” Joel teases, and you wish the sound of him calling you _that_ didn’t shoot to your toes. His smile is radiant and you try to memorize this rare expression without tripping over something in your own house. 

“Fuckin’ pushing it,” you emphasize, pointing to him as you retreat to the bar to scrounge up something pass the time while the dinner cooks. 

—

_Jackson, Saturday Morning_

Joel wakes up early on Saturday, hustling through scant chores and a long shower, arriving at squarely at seven in the morning with an empty cup of coffee before him on his kitchen island, shirt neatly tucked into his jeans, boots looking suspiciously more respectable and free of dirt than usual. He tries to force himself to sit after he pours another mug, eyes grazing the clock constantly. You’d been chewed on around nine AM three mornings ago, quarantine is a 72-hour-thing, and he bounces one knee nervously as the sunlight starts to slant across his kitchen floor to indicate something closer to a reasonable hour.

There’s a buzzy tension to him, realizing no buffer of over-caution needed to be enforced anymore. It meant not ignoring that his first reflex on realizing he hadn’t lost you was to finally kiss you. Ideally it meant he would get to finish the conversation he had tried to start. 

At ten minutes before nine, he barely finishes knocking when you whip open the door, short hair wet and a mug of tea in one hand. 

“Still human,” you note, spinning as if to prove it, lopsided grin trying to keep it light. You show him the bruise beginning to redden and wilt yellowish near the edges, purple receding like you’d been clenched in a smooth-edged bear trap instead of an infected maw. 

“May I come in?” He asks so formally that you step back and gesture inside with a little bow, closing off the cold behind him. Joel fills the space of your little entryway and you’re compelled to set your tea down where you keep your keys on the table, not breaking eye contact with him. 

“Listen, what I did after—” he starts, halting at the way you’re watching him without flinching. Your eyes flick to his mouth and he steps towards you, expecting you to back into the wall so he can stop and ask to kiss you this time.

You grasp the hair at the nape of his neck and kiss him hard, mouth opening for him as he instantly reciprocates, hands flying to your sides. You kiss adroitly, anticipating each other like its an old habit until Joel pushes you against the wall, coaxing your legs around his waist and holding you there to bring you level with him.

His tongue feels so exquisite, feels perfect to finally have him pressed against you like this—you don’t think of pace or timing as you speed to unbutton his shirt. Joel flicks yours open, smoothing his hand over your still-sore, riddled shoulder. He drops open-mouthed kisses there and you arc against him without meaning to. He piques an eyebrow with interest at that, clearly filing it away.

You slide your hands over his shoulders to urge his shirt off and he hastily twists out of it, grasping your thighs to move you into the living room. He gets to the dining room table instead, layout inverted from his own home, and laughs against your mouth before righting you both and trying to hasten back to the couch.

You pull his hair and wreck his balance, and he slams you both into the china cabinet that you’d never quite gotten the energy to move out of whoever’s house this was before. You slide your hand between your bodies and try to slip into the waistband of his jeans. Joel catches your wrist and slams it into the cabinet, shaking something off the top in the process, his other hand palming your breasts. You both laughagainst each other at the loud crash, Joel toeing the shards mostly out of your way.

You use your considerable lower body strength to spin Joel against the cabinet and emphasize what you want with your palm against his chest, wrenching the buttons of his fly open and falling to your knees in front of him. You swallow him near whole, finding him fully hard and hearing a tinny _tchink tchink_ as dishes jostle in the cabinet beside your combined weight. Thinking you’d be fully satisfied to kneel here and explore him just like this, you hollow your cheeks and revel in assessing his size, peeking up to watch him react.

“Fuck, _fuck_ , that has to wait,” he grimaces, gulping a huge breath and tugging on your hair. He uses that particular curse so rarely, even on life-or-death patrols, that you assent and draw off of him, watching him close his eyes as you slip off of his head.

Joel tugs you up roughly and half-stoops to get one arm under your knees, an act that would be effortless if pleasure wasn’t diffusing across every inch of his skin. He pointedly gets back to the couch in a few strides, long legs carrying you quickly.

He tosses you down lightly and covers your body with his, mouth roaming over your throat and collarbones. Joel sits back on his heels to unbutton your jeans and strip them away as you paw to drag his the rest of the way down.

He gives a nervous grunt as you both realize he still has his boots on, and you muscle your way into his lap to keep kissing him while he fumbles them off behind you, smiling into your kiss. When he’s free, you grind down against him and take him in your fist, earning a gasp as he turns his face against your chest.

Joel flips you both again, simply getting you under him and guiding himself to your core. You thrust up to receive him before he can ask to have you, and take scant time to adjust before he’s slamming into you. The blunt edge of his fingernails dig into your hips as he holds you fast, rearing back on his knees to get the best angle. His physicality hadn’t been lost on you for a moment, but you let him stretch you open while you take him in anyway. He’s in excellent shape, definition emphasized by the tight clench of his abdomen as he takes you. Figuring it’s acceptable to gawk with him this deep inside of you, you span a palm over his chest and the dark hair there, unmistakable line of it directly between his hipbones so gratifying now that you weren’t just seeing it in accidental flashes. 

As good as the impact of his motions shaking the entire couch and your body feel, you roll up towards him so you’re seated squarely in his lap so you keep kissing him while you move together. The change in angle doesn’t tone down the way every one of your bones is rattling as he responds urgently to you riding him.

Joel’s broad hands are everywhere, unable to pause on one spot, bunching in your hair to keep you where he likes as you fuck each other with building intensity. It’s like you’re both trying to lead a dance and each had only ever learned to follow, too messy with need to get out of each other’s way. It’s not skillful and that fact is utterly missed on both your accelerating orgasms. 

“I’m okay, I’m all here,” you murmur against his mouth as his hands stroke over you like he’s reassuring himself. You thread your own hands into his black hair, thumbing his jaw through his beard. 

“Stay that way,” he pleads back, one hand on your jaw, one guiding your hips over his and working his tongue into your mouth for want of more ways to be connected to you.

You want to respond but the way you’re rocking together only facilitates a moan escaping as you start to spasm around him. 

Joel pulls back deliberately with his hand on your chin so he can watch—you pull his thumb into your mouth and bite softly as you come, shuddering and bucking in his lap. His brows draw up tense as he follows you, keeping his eyes on yours until he cries out with his forehead against your collarbone on the side with the enormous pressure bruise.

Your rapid panting twines even as it starts to slow, and Joel pulls back to press a soft kiss to your shoulder, eyes still on you, still inside you.

“C’mere,” you slide off of him carefully, awareness of how sore you were going to be settling in to muscles overworked by impatient need. Pulling both your chests together to feel your heartbeats at once, his eyes drift like he’s finally calmed by the sensation, strumming along your spine with an open hand.

You half-assemble yourselves in the brightening morning light, squinting at clothes strewn out of reach across the bottom floor of your house. You both become a little more sheepish in the aftermath, shy smiles coming comfortably but tension not dissolved. Joel feels at ease moving beneath you in a way you’d never seen him.

“I’ll go grab our shirts,” you start, trying to rise. 

“Can I just take you upstairs for the rest of the day?” he counters, low, warm voice filling you. 

“No plans today?” You raise your eyebrows at him curiously.

“Just the one,” he breathes. 

You finish standing and cock your head at him, extending your hand. There’s no shyness in the way he looks at you now, just the directness wrought by plans to continue rearranging your life in broad daylight. 

He rises and picks you up before you can react. 

“Joel, it’s just upstairs,” you whine, not really upset by whatever this was from him.

“It was three days. And you wouldn’t let me in,” he objects.

“Longer wait than three days, cowboy,” you mutter.

He raises his eyebrows in good humor at the endearment, placing you on your still-mussed bed. You drag him close and pull him down to the bed, finding yourself caged in his arms. 

“Come here,” you demand, pulling him towards you. No amount of daylight was going to be enough for you today, and you faintly think someone will have to go out to find food eventually. 

“Nope, whole new bunch of questions need answerin’,” Joel kisses you confidently and it feels nice on him; feels soaringly good to you. 

Whatever of his taciturn nature had fed the edges of your caution before had been absolutely obliterated by receiving a whole vocabulary he could access in this context. You’d thought him a little gun-shy at first, but his mouth on yours is joined by thoughtful fingers teasing at your entrance. There’s nothing rushed about it, and he exudes competent experience and reactive curiosity as he spreads you.

Joel mouths down your chest seriously, brows knitting like it requires all of his focus. 

“Wasted so much goddamn time just looking at you,” he whispers, leaning against the inside of your thigh. Joel usually couldn’t fix your gaze too long before this, ducking his head or pulling his guard up before meeting your eyes. You see the hazel you’d always carefully noted as he rests against your skin and smirk a little triumphantly at the sight, his pupils blown out dark and mouth reddened from friction. Joel Miller was so damn appealing it was a little preposterous, and your hands flex to touch him again.

He gives you a look that’s too vulnerable for the way he tucks your thigh over his shoulder, placing his mouth over your clit and sucking hard with absolutely no ceremony. Joel eats you ravenously over long minutes, adjusting to each sound you make and spreading his tongue over you until you’re shaking. The room begins to warm, not just with the sun cresting the mountains that ring Jackson as the day creeps higher. 

Joel pistons his tongue into you, swirling around your clit on each upstroke. You come, fisting the sheets hard enough that you both look up and laugh as a long rip signals that you’d wrecked your sheets, at least on one side. 

“…hold onto me instead, you know,” Joel teases into your ear once he’s climbed up your body as you gasp under him. He could slip into you without hesitation now, so you grab his ass and do your best to get him on his back. He relents and rolls, handily outmatching your strength but completely bent to your will. 

“You didn’t let me finish,” you hiss at him, slipping down his body to take him deep in your mouth. 

Joel grunts and you glance up to see him biting his own forearm above his wristwatch, his other hand working into your hair. 

It’s clear that he absolutely loves this, yelping when you get a wet hand around the length of him that your mouth can’t take, twisting and pumping in time with your lips and tongue. You think you could stay here entirely contented for longer than you’d ever imagined, helpless noises escaping him and spurring you.

“Stop or I won’t last,” he grits, hips rolling beyond his command, chest expanding rapidly.

You pull off with faux annoyance, licking a stripe up the crest of his hipbone and smiling when he jumps a little.

“Sort of the point,” you note before taking him back in your mouth, taking him as far into your throat as you can manage, tearing up along the way. 

“Christ,” he sighs quietly, deft fingers grasping your hair, almost riding your face though he’s under you.

You span a hand over his ribs, fingertips settling in the grooves of old scars and stroking. 

Joel grunts as he comes, flexing obscenely in your mouth and making a noise you could have only fantasized about before. Swallowing him down takes work and he writhes throughout it, callused fingertips abrading your scalp through your fine hair as oversensitivity crashes onto him.

You crawl back up his body, his hands urging you and feeling everything he can reach as you settle into his arms, a leg tucked over his lap. 

Joel kisses you without hesitating and you taste each other in a far deeper rhythm than two fucked-out people should be building to. Any other context and you two could have woken up like this, staying in bed late to please each other, comforter heaped on the floor. 

He pulls back with something leaping in his eyes.

“Give me,” he looks over your body, thumbing a nipple possessively, “…twenty minutes at most, and I have intentions for you,” he says, tapping your foreheads together. 

“Twenty?” you raise your eyebrows. You hadn’t risked a lot of men since the outbreak, but that would be genuinely impressive. You readjust your cheek against his bicep, his arm tucked tight around your waist.

Joel rolls his eyes good-naturedly and grabs your jaw, kissing you again. He lets you study him when you pull back, seeming to do the same with the pad of his thumb arcing over your cheekbone. 

He strokes your bruise, wincing a little at the obvious pain it confers. 

“This is never happening again,” Joel softly thumbs the wound, “but I’m not staying locked outside if it did.”

“ _This_ didn’t happen because you nailed it before it could do more, gums or not,” you chuckle. 

He nods.

“You heard me, though?” Joel asks, feeling a little bare.

“You really think I’m letting you outside again?” you ask, tapping his lower lip with your teeth before kissing him slowly, moving assuredly as he enfolds you in both his arms. 

**Author's Note:**

> Practicality note: either someone’s infertile or they’re both stupid and that’s fine; didn’t want to kill the momentum here for them to have the obligatory “hey outbreak babies are a terrible risk to the person bearing them” conversation. 
> 
> Consummatory intimacy > reproductive logistics, just this once! Also, reader can be whatever age you want, but as I write, I think of her as close enough to Joel’s age to probably not be in childbearing years.


End file.
